The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956

(Doubleday; 566 pages; $35)

Six Months in 1945

FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman - From World War to Cold War

By Michael Dobbs

Two new books, each gripping in its own fashion, illuminate one of the great European tragedies of the 20th century: the cutting off of Eastern Europe from the rest of the continent.

Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain" pulls no punches in demonstrating the totality of Soviet domination over the territories it had conquered in its war with Nazi Germany. As may be seen from the verb in her subtitle, she shows how Stalin managed to crush any vestige of democratic opposition and indeed any free institutions of what we now call civil society in the years following victory in 1945. Michael Dobbs' superbly evocative and readable account of events in the first half of that year shows just how Stalin's allies allowed this state of affairs to come about.

"Six Months in 1945" begins with a description of Franklin D. Roosevelt's flight to the Crimean city of Yalta to meet with Joseph Stalin at the beginning of February. So vivid is the writing that you can practically feel the shuddering vibration and turbulence in what was then the state-of-the-art aircraft carrying Roosevelt on the first visit by an American president to the Soviet Union. Dobbs' account is filled with telling details, like the effect of seeing the devastation only recently wrought by Nazi troops in FDR's drive across the Crimea from the airport to the sumptuous czarist palace that would house him in Yalta:

"Roosevelt had read reports about the aerial bombardment of Coventry and Rotterdam and the leveling of Warsaw and Lidice, but this was the first time he had seen the Nazi destruction up close. It made a profound impression. He told [his daughter] Anna that the gruesome sights along the road made him want 'to get even' with the Germans more than ever."

The Potsdam Conference six months later that provides the other bookend along with Yalta to Dobbs' book took place adjacent to the all-but-completely ruined German capital of Berlin. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that this was no accident, placement orchestrated by Stalin to ensure that an American president was going to be heavily influenced by his on-site observation of what the Nazis had done to their own continent. This probably helped induce a kind of tunnel vision that, along with certain strategic calculations involving Russian participation in the war against Japan soon to be altered by the atomic bomb, led to giving Stalin what amounted to a free hand in the eastern half of Europe.

But Dobbs' clear-eyed account shows that Roosevelt's weakness at Yalta and Truman's inexperience at Potsdam - as well as the overconfidence these two very different characters shared - allowed the hard-nosed Soviet dictator to box successfully above his actual weight, with terrible consequences for millions.

Just how terrible emerges from the searing pages of Applebaum's controlled but still passionate account of the hydra-headed process that brought about the exchange of one tyranny for another. She begins by examining the nature of totalitarianism:

"Although it has been most often used to describe Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, the word 'totalitarian' - totalitarismo - was first used in the context of Italian fascism. Invented by one of his critics, the term was adopted with enthusiasm by Benito Mussolini, and in one of his speeches he offered what is still the best definition of the term: 'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.' Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought."

You can see immediately the breadth of this scholar's range along with the precision of her diction, hallmarks of a clear-headed analytical intellect reflected throughout her book.

And she has the knack of referencing the well-chosen phrase to leaven her text and make it accessible, while still showing the scrupulousness, as well as the toughness, of her scholarship:

" 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.' That grim motto, sometimes incorrectly attributed to Stalin, sums up the worldview of the men and women who built communism and who believed that their high-minded goals justified human sacrifice."

"Iron Curtain" allows us to learn just how painful the breaking of those eggs was. The brutal and ruthless extinction of political opposition against the actual will of the people in whose name power was being seized. The establishment of a party elite as a ruling oligarchy. The corruption of a just judiciary, making it an instrument of tyranny. In short, the assumption of total control over the lives of citizens.

As Applebaum writes, "Above all, I sought to gain an understanding of real totalitarianism - not totalitarianism in theory but totalitarianism in practice - and how it shaped the lives of millions of Europeans in the twentieth century." Her quest was successful, not just as an auto-educational exercise but because she has managed to communicate magnificently her superbly informed insights, enabling us to understand not just how this subjugation was imposed but the seeds of its ultimate impermanence, as we saw in 1989: